Posts Tagged ‘AIG’

President Obama’s Department of Justice announced last week that there would be no indictments in the collapse of AIG, an event which led to a worldwide economic collapse and cost the American taxpayer trillions. As someone who once worked for AIG I was shocked, but apparently that’s how this mystery ends: Hundreds of millions of victims, smoking guns in every room, and not a perp to be found anywhere. (more…)

The past week the Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal sued Moody’s Investors Services and Standard & Poor’s over falsified debt ratings. This suit is the first of its kind against rating agencies under the state’s unfair trade practices law. The AG is seeking penalties and fines that could reach into billions of dollars.

We in this publication have asked for three years why no civil or criminal charges were not brought against these raters, but also against the banks, brokerage firms and the Federal Reserve, which colluded with them in this scam that cost investors worldwide trillions of dollars? These bonds are the collateralized debt obligations, which the Fed purchased from financial institutions over the past year to the tune of $868 billion, which the American taxpayer will have to pay the losses on. (more…)

Full story here from Janet Tavakoli. Like a hand grenade in a barrel of oatmeal…

Congress should act immediately to abolish credit default swaps on the United States, because these derivatives will foment distortions in global currencies and gold. Failure to act now will only mean the U.S. will be forced to act after these “financial weapons of mass destruction” levy heavy casualties. These obligations now settle in euros, but the end game is to settle them in gold. This is so ripe for speculative manipulation that you might as well cover the U.S. map with a bull’s-eye. (more…)

Full story here from American Thinker. Actually Timmay may be breaking rocks at Ryker’s Island one day.

“While everyone, including Congress, the media, and the public, have focused on AIG’s $100-million bonus payments to key employees, and most recently on AIG’s stealth payments to counterparties like Chase and the French giant Société Générale — the latter made worse by the fact that it was the Federal Reserve (FED) that wanted to keep these payments hidden from public view — the problem with the AIG bailout is much deeper and more fundamental.(more…)

“Matt Taibbi writes: Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren’t just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy – they’re re-creating the conditions for another crash.

On January 21st, Lloyd Blankfein left a peculiar voicemail message on the work phones of his employees at Goldman Sachs. Fast becoming America’s pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman’s role in precipitating the global financial crisis. (more…)

“Would it be wrong to take out a $1,000,000 policy on your wife and then put strychnine in her double-tall nonfat mocha?

Not if you are Goldman Sachs it wouldn’t. In fact–according to an article on today’s Bloomberg News–that’s exactly what they did. They slapped together $17.2 billion in garbage CDOs and then insured the hell out of them with credit default swaps (CDS) issued by AIG. As soon as the CDS blew up, G-Sax collected 100 cents on the dollar for their ingenuity. (G Sax received $14B altogether) (more…)

Full story here. Nice to see those Goldman execs were practicing what they preached about the greatness of the firm and their commitment to the “long haul”. Not!

“In an interview last week, President Obama said he didn’t begrudge Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorganChase, and Lloyd Blankfein, the head man at Goldman Sachs, their 2009 bonuses of $17 million and $9 million, respectively. He said that while $17 million was “an extraordinary amount of money,” there are “some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

While one could argue that, metaphorically anyway, both Dimon and Blankfein made it to the World Series in 2009 — with Blankfein, whose firm earned $13.4 billion last year, being the M.V.P. — President Obama went one step further in trying to publicly support Wall Street by saying he knew both men to be “savvy businessmen,” and that “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth.”

“The subprime debt issue of 2007 blossomed into a global credit crisis. Likewise, the Dubai sovereign debt issue will blossom into a global sovereign debt crisis in similar pathogenesis. The start and end points are located in the United States and United Kingdom. With the global climax come disruption, restructure, and chaos. The subprime mortgage problem was grossly under-estimated. The Hat Trick Letter called it the beginning of an absolute bond contagion, a global credit market collapse correctly forecasted. Central bankers, led by the disoriented USFed Chairman Bernanke, minimized the degree and depth of the credit crisis, and made every conceivable wrong forecast. His reward was reappointment, since his service to the financial center has been steadfast, loyal, and inventive. Every phase of global finance has entered a crisis mode, as the financial structures are coordinated, linked in complete fashion by the tightening noose using a US$ brand of rope. (more…)

“Once upon a time, Goldman Sachs shunned publicity. During the period from 1930 to 1969, Sydney Weinberg ran Goldman Sachs where he developed a staunch corporate cultural aversion to publicity. During the 1970s, a tandem of John Weinberg and John Whitehead assumed the reigns of leadership at Goldman Sachs. Whitehead left the company in 1984 to enter public life. John Weinberg carried on in the same vein as his father Sydney – shunning publicity – to the point where he hired a man to keep his name and his firm’s out of the press.

He kept him off the full-time payroll (though he sat full-time at a desk in head office) so that if, improbably, a comment did slip out, it could be honestly dismissed as not coming from a Goldman Sachs employee. John Weinberg served as sole senior partner and chairman until 1990. His mantra was to put the client’s interests first and he wouldn’t allow Goldman to be involved hostile takeovers. (more…)